'Sound,' says another voice.
Shaftoe looks harder and sees that it is not a bomb but a large bullet-shaped microphone on the end of a boom.
The lieutenant with the pompadour leans forward now, instinctively seeking the light, like a traveler on a cold winter's night.
It is that guy from the movies. What's-his-name. Oh, yeah!
Ronald Reagan has a stack of three-by-five cards in his lap. He skids up a new one: 'What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have for any young Marines on their way to Guadalcanal?'
Shaftoe doesn't have to think very long. The memories are still as fresh as last night's eleventh nightmare: ten plucky Nips in
'Just kill the one with the sword first.'
'Ah,' Reagan says, raising his waxed and penciled eyebrows, and cocking his pompadour in Shaftoe's direction.
'No, fuckhead!' Shaftoe yells. 'You kill 'em because they've got fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a
Reagan backs down. He's scared now, sweating off some of his makeup, even though a cool breeze is coming in off the bay and through the window.
Reagan wants to turn tail and head back down to Hollywood and nail a starlet fast. But he's stuck here in Oakland, interviewing the war hero. He flips through his stack of cards, rejects about twenty in a row. Shaftoe's in no hurry, he's going to be flat on his back in this hospital bed for approximately the rest of his life. He incinerates half of that cigarette with one long breath, holds it, blows out a smoke ring.
When they fought at night, the big guns on the warships made rings of incandescent gas. Not fat doughnuts but long skinny ones that twisted around like lariats. Shaftoe's body is saturated with morphine. His eyelids avalanche down over his eyes, blessing those orbs that are burning and swollen from the film lights and the smoke of the cigarettes. He and his platoon are racing an incoming tide, trying to get around a headland. They are Marine Raiders and they have been chasing a particular unit of Nips across Guadalcanal for two weeks, whittling them down. As long as they're in the neighborhood, they've been ordered to make their way to a certain point on the headland from which they ought to be able to lob mortar rounds against the incoming Tokyo Express. It is a somewhat harebrained and reckless tactic, but they don't call this Operation Shoestring for nothing; it is all wacky improvisation from the get-go. They are behind schedule because this paltry handful of Nips has been really tenacious, setting ambushes behind every fallen log, taking potshots at them every time they come around one of these headlands. . .
Something clammy hits him on the forehead: it is the makeup artist taking a swipe at him. Shaftoe finds himself back in the nightmare within which the lizard nightmare was nested.
'Did I tell you about the lizard?' Shaftoe says.
'Several times,' his interrogator says. 'This'll just take another minute.' Ronald Reagan squeezes a fresh three-by-five card between thumb and forefinger, fastening onto something a little less emotional: 'What did you and your buddies do in the evenings, when the day's fighting was done?'
'Pile up dead Nips with a bulldozer,' Shaftoe says, 'and set fire to 'em. Then go down to the beach with a jar of hooch and watch our ships get torpedoed.'
Reagan grimaces. 'Cut!' he says, quietly but commanding. The clicking noise of the film camera stops.
'How'd I do?' Bobby Shaftoe says as they are squeegeeing the Maybelline off his face, and the men are packing up their equipment. The klieg lights have been turned off, clear northern California light streams in through the windows. The whole scene looks almost real, as if it weren't a nightmare at all.
'You did great,' Lieutenant Reagan says, without looking him in the eye. 'A real morale booster.' He lights a cigarette. 'You can go back to sleep now.'
'Haw!' Shaftoe says. 'I been asleep the whole time. Haven't I?'
He feels a lot better once he gets out of the hospital. They give him a couple of weeks of leave, and he goes straight to the Oakland station and hops the next train for Chicago. Fellow-passengers recognize him from his newspaper pictures, buy him drinks, pose with him for snap shots. He stares out the windows for hours, watching America go by, and sees that all of it is beautiful and clean. There might be wildness, there might be deep forest, there might even be grizzly bears and mountain lions, but it is cleanly sorted out, and the rules (don't mess with bear cubs, hang your food from a tree limb at night) are well-known, and published in the Boy Scout Manual. In those Pacific islands there is too much that is alive, and all of it is in a continual process of eating and being eaten by something else, and once you set foot in the place, you're buying into the deal. Just sitting in that train for a couple of days, his feet in clean white cotton socks, not being eaten alive by anything, goes a long way towards clearing his head up. Only once, or possibly two or three times, does he really feel the need to lock himself in the can and squirt morphine into his arm.
But when he closes his eyes, he finds himself on Guadalcanal, sloshing around that last headland, racing the incoming tide. The big waves are rolling in now, picking up the men and slamming them into rocks.
Finally they turn the corner and see the cove: just a tiny notch in the coast of Guadalcanal. A hundred yards of tidal mudflats backed up by a cliff. They will have to get across those mudflats and establish a foothold on the lower part of the cliff if they aren't going to be washed out to sea by the tide.
The Shaftoes are Tennessee mountain people-miners, among other things. About the time Nimrod Shaftoe went to the Philippines, a couple of his brothers moved up to western Wisconsin to work in lead mines. One of them-Bobby's grandpa-became a foreman. Sometimes he would go to Oconomowoc to pay a visit to the owner of the mine, who had a summer house on one of the lakes. They would go out in a boat and fish for pike. Frequently the mine owner's neighbors-owners of banks and breweries-would come along. That is how the Shaftoes moved to Oconomowoc, and got out of mining, and became fishing and hunting guides. The family has been scrupulous about holding on to the ancestral twang, and to certain other traditions such as military service. One of his sisters and two of his brothers are still living there with Mom and Dad, and his two older brothers are in the Army. Bobby's not the first to have won a Silver Star, though he is the first to have won the Navy Cross.
Bobby goes and talks to Oconomowoc's Boy Scout troop. He gets to be grand marshal of the town parade. Other than that, he hardly budges from the house for two weeks. Sometimes he goes out into the yard and plays catch with his kid brothers. He helps Dad fix up a rotten dock. Guys and gals from his high school keep coming round to visit, and Bobby soon learns the trick that his father and his uncles and granduncles all knew, which is that you never talk about the specifics of what happened over there. No one wants to hear about how you dug half of your buddy's molars out of your leg with the point of a bayonet. All of these kids seem like idiots and lightweights to him now. The only person he can stand to be around is his great-grandfather Shaftoe, ninety-four years of age and sharp as a tack, who was there at Petersburg when Burnside blew a huge hole in the Confederate lines with buried explosives and sent his men rushing into the crater where they got slaughtered. He never talks about it, of course, just as Bobby Shaftoe never talks about the lizard.
Soon enough his time is up, and then he gets a grand sendoff at the Milwaukee train station, hugs Mom, hugs Sis, shakes hands with Dad and the brothers, hugs Mom again, and he's off.
Bobby Shaftoe knows nothing of his future. All he knows is that he has been promoted to sergeant, detached from his former unit (no great adjustment, since he is the only surviving member of his platoon) and reassigned to some unheard-of branch of the Corps in Washington, D.C.
D.C.'s a busy place, but last time Bobby Shaftoe checked the newspapers, there wasn't any combat going on there, and so it's obvious he's not going to get a combat job. He's done his bit anyway, killed many more than his share of Nips, won his medals, suffered from his wounds. As he lacks administrative training, he expects that his new assignment will be to travel around the country being a war hero, raising morale and suckering young men into joining the Corps.
He reports, as ordered, to Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C. It's the Corps's oldest post, a city block halfway between the Capitol and the Navy Yard, a green quadrangle where the Marine Band struts and the drill
